5/13/2009 @ 4:00PM

In Depth: America's Best Bargain Cities

To determine which U.S. cities are the best bargain, Forbes looked at the country’s 50 largest U.S. metropolitan statistical areas and metropolitan divisions–geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We assigned points to metro regions across four data sets: Average salary for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher, from
PayScale.com; annual unemployment statistics, from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics; cost of living, from Moody’s
Economy.com; and the Housing Opportunity Index, from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo, which measures the amount of homes sold in a given area that would be affordable to a family earning the local median income based on standard mortgage underwriting criteria.

9. Houston, Texas

(Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas)

Cost of Living: 30 of 50

Housing Opportunity: 25 of 50

Unemployment Rate: 11 of 50

Average Salary: 10 of 50

Read on for more lists, rankings and real estate coverage including stories on America’s most overpriced cities and places where homeowners are the most in debt.